The right food for body and mind

Power foods: New diet that might protect your brain

Aug. 7, 2013

The research on foods that might protect memory is still emerging and it’s too early to say with certainty things we eat can change the course of brain disease.

Yet, nutritionists and wellness authors are increasingly focused on how healthy lifestyles such as eating whole, unprocessed foods can safeguard against a host of diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

“When I talk to groups, the focus is on eating a ‘healthier diet’ which is composed of whole grains, fruits, vegetables and good fats,” said dietician Liz Mocadlo, the director of Food and Nutrition Services at Riverview Hospital Association in Wisconsin Rapids.

If there is a type of diet Mocadlo advocates it’s modeling the nutrition found in the Mediterranean diet. The food choices in it are healthy oils, very little red meat, whole grains, veggies, fish and nuts.

The right kind of fatty acids are found in Omega 3-rich food sources such as tuna, salmon, nuts and seeds, she said. You want to keep foods you eat minimally processed, for the most nutritional value.

Barnard designed and adopted this approach to living after observing what happened to his grandparents and parents. While growing up on a cattle farm in Fargo, N.D., Barnard says, his family consumed a diet high in animal fats: “We ate roast beef, potatoes and corn night after night.”

During the last decade of their lives, Barnard visited his older family members in nursing homes “where their hearts were beating but their minds were gone.”

His four food groups are loaded with nutrients and antioxidants that reduce brain shrinkage by eliminating free radicals, which destroy brain cells, he says.

The payoff can be “enormous,” he says, adding that you can ward off vascular dementia, in which damaged blood vessels can no long carry adequate levels of oxygen to the brain, and stroke, also shown to cause certain kinds of dementia. The book has dozens of recipes that “make it easy to give up meat and fish,” he says.

Barnard supports his ideas with studies, but be mindful of the kind of studies he examined, says Sanjay Asthana, director of the Alzheimer’s disease research center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Most are epidemiological studies based on what people say they eat and on how their health changes over a period of years. The gold standard for research is a randomized controlled trial, in which participants would be put on different diets and their health monitored.

The best approach is to begin to be mindful about what we eat.

Mocadlo said a lack of cooking skills can be an obstacle to eating unprocessed foods.

“A lot don’t know how to cook. They think that opening a box in boiling water is cooking,” Mocadlo said. She suggests cooking with your children to teach them how to use whole foods, good for the body and mind.